Ownership, licences and stored work

Storage does not transfer ownership. Terms grant licences

Copyright in a photograph belongs to whoever made it, and uploading a file somewhere does not move it. What a storage provider’s terms of service do is grant that provider a licence - permission to do specific things with your files so that the service can function.

That licence is not optional and not, by itself, a warning sign. A service physically cannot store, copy between regions, generate a thumbnail or send a file to a browser without permission to copy and transmit it. The question worth asking is never is there a licence but what is the licence limited to.

Three limits are worth reading for, in any provider’s terms:

• Scope. Is the licence granted for operating and providing the service, or does it extend to improving, developing, promoting or training? Those extra verbs are where a hosting licence becomes something else.
• Duration. Does it end when you delete the file or close the account, or is it described as perpetual or irrevocable? A licence that survives deletion is describing something other than hosting.
• Sublicensing. Can the provider pass the licence on to affiliates, partners or successors? This is the clause that decides what an acquisition does to your archive.

This page is a reading guide, not legal advice, and it does not interpret any specific company’s terms - including PhotoLog’s. PhotoLog’s terms are the document that governs your account, and it is the one to read.

What PhotoLog’s architecture does with access

Beyond what any terms say, a key model decides who can open a file at all. PhotoLog’s is hierarchical: a studio has its own key, sealed to each of its members; each vault inside a studio has its own key wrapped under the studio’s; and each photo or video has its own key, generated once, never reused, wrapped under its vault’s current key.

The practical consequence for a working photographer is about removal. When someone is removed from a vault, its keys are rotated, so material added afterwards is protected by keys that person never held.

And here is the limit, stated where you will read it rather than in a footnote. Rotation protects what comes next. It does not reach backwards into anything already downloaded, screenshotted or synced to a device. The same is true of a share link: deactivating one stops further access through it, and does not undo what a holder already saw or saved. A compromised link is replaced, not repaired.

If that sounds obvious, it is worth saying anyway, because “revoke access” is routinely written as though it retrieves files. It does not, here or anywhere.

Delivering work to a client

A client gallery is a share, and a share link works like a key: whoever holds it can use it. Two practical consequences follow.

• Send it over a channel you would send a key over. A link forwarded into a group chat is a link the group has.
• Deactivate on a schedule, not on a suspicion. Because deactivation is forward-looking, its value is in limiting how long a link stays live, not in undoing a leak after the fact.

Client delivery covers the workflow itself.

Model training, and the honest limit of the assurance

PhotoLog does not run content analysis or model training over customer media - no machine-learning or image-recognition dependency appears in its dependency manifests, checked 2026-09-01. That is a statement about conduct and installed capability, evidenced negatively. No-AI storage explains what that kind of evidence does and does not establish, and gives four questions for testing the same claim against any provider.

What none of this settles is what happens outside a provider’s storage: a photograph published on a portfolio site, a social platform or a client’s own website is governed by that platform’s terms and by whatever crawls it, not by where the original is archived. Storage architecture answers a narrow question well. It does not answer that one at all.